Hanging On For Dear Life

White Beach, Boracay, Philippines, December 2007 

It’s nighttime, the wind is blowing steadily at 20+ knots gusting to 25+. The anchor line is pulled taut like a guitar string, it looks ready to snap any second now. We are not used to anchoring in these conditions. I am so stressed out and wondering if our rope and anchor will hold. I ask Raul for the umpteenth time if we indeed have the correct rope and anchor for the sandy bottom, if we set it properly and let out the proper amount of line. I envy my husband's cool state of mind. After a while, I surrender to our conditions and decide to have a few drinks and smoke some weed in order to relax and fall asleep.

Boracay's cool powdery sand was too tempting for Mariel.

Around midnight, Raul wakes me up to even more powerful winds and a boat that’s rocking like a horse. The wind is whistling, no it’s shrieking, howling fiercefully around me. The boat is creaking and groaning, ropes banging. He wants to take down our trapal, the tarpaulin we use to cover the rear half of the boat. This was our first sailboat then, Marikit, which did not have a bimini so we used a makeshift piece of heavy canvas to protect us from the sun during the day. It hangs over the boom then tied to the lifelines on the sides and measured approximately 3 x 4 meters. Because the wind is now blowing 30+ knots, Raul wants to bring it down because it was catching wind and pulling Marikit with it, and it might tear off and fly away.

Huh? I am stoned senseless and still drunk. But you always obey the captain, right? So we go out on deck and get to work. We have to do this properly or else we will lose the trapal, or one of us gets hurt by the billowing canvas and its numerous ropes, or, worst of all, someone falls in the water. My job is to hold the trapal down while Raul unties the sides from front to back until we are ready to fold it together.

But it takes me a while to understand what Raul is saying. I can’t get his instructions through my thick skull. I look at him blankly as the words slowly travel to my ears and my brain struggles to understand. Tell my ears to tell my brain to tell my arms to.... until one minute later- ohhh ok so you want me to hold down the trapal!

One of several overnight stops we made to break the trip from Batangas to Boracay

I can’t hold the trapal down with my hands. I am too small and powerless against the wind and the jerking boat. So I fling myself across the boom and use myself as a human paperweight. I lose my footing so I am draped across like a piece of laundry, my feet dangling, the boom swinging wildly from side to side with me on top of it like a rag doll, a stoned rag doll, hanging on for dear life, with a single thought- hang on, don’t let go. One thing about weed, you get wasted so you’re only capable of one thought at a time- hang on, don’t let go. I can’t think beyond that. I hold on until Raul tells me what to do next. I don’t have the mental faculties to check what he is doing, how we are doing. I am just waiting for Raul to give me his next instructions like an obedient child, a spaced out obedient child.

I’m not really sure how we did it but we finished the job without losing the tarpaulin or anyone falling overboard. I am happy to crawl back to bed in one piece. Good thing about weed, when Raul asked me to go out on the deck with him, I was too stoned to argue or process the pros and cons of what we were going to do. I just accepted the captain’s orders. If I were sober, I would have told him that we shouldn’t do it, it was too dangerous, we might fall off, it was too dark. But then again if I were sober I could have managed the job easily and then there would have been no need to say that, right?

Kids, don’t try this at home.

We had a pod of dolphins swimming with us for more than an hour on our way home from Boracay east of Mindoro.